


belief

by lonely_is_so_lonely_alone



Category: Law & Order
Genre: Episode: s06e23 Aftershock, F/M, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, post-ep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26568808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonely_is_so_lonely_alone/pseuds/lonely_is_so_lonely_alone
Summary: He doesn’t believe in ghosts. Nope. Not at all. He is Jack McCoy, rational down to cynical. He’s seen all the world can offer, right under the floorboards of humanity and back out. He doesn't believe in ghost but - but -there’s a ghost sitting on the edge of his desk when he gets back from court.- Every time Jack McCoy loses an ADA, there's a familiar face there to talk about why.
Relationships: Claire Kincaid/Jack McCoy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	belief

**Author's Note:**

> I'm back. Writing into the void. God I'm so late to this party.

He doesn’t believe in ghosts. Nope. Not at all. He is Jack McCoy, rational down to cynical. He’s seen all the world can offer, right under the floorboards of humanity and back out. He doesn't believe in ghost but - 

but -

there’s a ghost sitting on the edge of his desk when he gets back from court. 

It’s been a long day. He keeps his head down, loosens his tie with a free hand. He walks so heavy his boot marks dent into the carpet. Adam’s gone, Jamie’s quit. It’s just Jack and Jack, he doesn’t believe in ghosts. 

Until he’s sitting there and the curtains are drawn and there’s only the desk lamp on and she says, ‘So?’ He shivers. Right down his spine. The hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He rests his palms flat on the grains of the wood and lifts his weary head. 

And there she is. The  _ ghost.  _

‘Claire?’ he breathes. He blinks like he’s drunk six whiskeys in a row. He blinks like daddy’s hands have sliced into his cheek bone. He blinks like this is a dream - this has to be a dream, a dream and it’s not real. It’s not. It’s not. 

‘You know she lasted as long as me,’ the ghost says. ‘Ms Ross. _ Two years _ . Maybe it’s some kind of record in this place?’ 

She laughs. 

Jack runs a hand across his eyes but he doesn't look at her. Don’t give her a second thought, he thinks, except her voice is like a siren and she’s leading him somewhere - somewhere far away and long ago to a pain in his chest he thought he’d learned to forget. 

‘You’re dead,’ he says. He’s talking to himself. Oh he is. It was the case. It was tough, Adam’s still not replaced Jamie, Jack’s doing all the leg work and he’s old, his bones creek with it. He’s tired, ok. He’s getting his memories mixed up. It’s this place; it’s this damn office that they should’ve ripped down, piece by piece, book by book, the moment that - the moment that Claire ---

He looks up. She’s wearing that purple blouse, wrapped in her leather Jacket. Her hair is pushed away from her face. She’s smiling and her eyes are soft and all he can think of is the way she looked in the driver’s seat of that car the last time he saw her. The car, the seat, - that’s how she died. In those clothes, in that car, he has always been able to imagine it like a freeze frame, a photograph. 

And now it is breathing. It feels so real that he could reach out and touch her -

He pulls at his collar until the first button frees itself. It’s like he’s choking, like he can’t breathe. It’s all caught up in his chest. He heaves for it. 

‘You’re dead,’ he says again. He wants to close his eyes but he can’t look away and there’s a headache and --- and --- ‘Oh Claire,’ he says, ‘I miss you.’ 

‘You should get a new office,’ she says. She reaches forward to pick up a book, but her fingers hover over the cover, feather light, soft like light. He laughs, but it catches in his throat and sounds more like a sob. He forges forward regardless. 

_ ‘Exactly _ . I’ll take Adam’s. I’ll move buildings. I’ll do anything.’  _ Anything not to stay here, with you like a ghost in the walls.  _

‘What about Jamie Ross?’ 

‘What about her?’ 

‘How did she compare?’ 

‘Compare to who?’ he closes his eyes. ‘Oh,’ he says, quiet. ‘Oh.’  _ To you.  _ Liz told him that he had to let it go. Liz said, ‘Try not to think of your next assistant as a replacement.’ 

And Jack had shook his head and said, ‘What then? A second chance not to fuck it up?’ and he’d laughed but Liz Olivet didn’t find jokes like that funny. 

He keeps his eyes shut. He makes himself think about Jamie Ross as she’d been when she said goodbye, briefcase in her hand, a promise to come back and visit, to not let him get all locked up in his ivory tower of law. She was getting out - she was putting her daughter first and walking out that door with her head held high. 

‘You were one hell of a girl, Claire,’ he says. He opens his eyes and he expects to find her smiling in that way that lights up her face, the way she’d smile at him when she lay next to him in his bed. The way she looked when she said - when she said - 

But she’s not there. There’s just nothing, a fracture in the air, a memory. No ghost. Anyway, Jack McCoy doesn’t believe in them. 

In the other room, a cleaner clicks a hoover into life and Jack thinks, fuck I’m going to have a headache in the morning. 

….

He’d ask Adam for the day off. One day a year. Same day. He’d put a formal request in and fill out that form, and in the box that said  _ reason  _ he wouldn’t put anything but he’d circle the date a hundred times and Adam Schiff always knew why. 

The first year, when Jamie Ross shadowed him, Jack rocked into work the next day stinking of booze and she said, ‘Wow, I see why you had a migraine.’ Adam had tried to make him talk about it. They’d sat together that morning and the older man had clearly wanted to say something but he’d never been able to find his voice and Jack McCoy laughed, ‘cause there’s always a first time for everything. Adam hadn’t even managed one line,  _ one line of anything.  _

The next time, Jack didn’t drink. He faced it stone cold sober and it nearly killed him. Nobody followed him anywhere. 

He saw her ghost a couple months after that. 

He knew it would be worse this time. He knew it down in his old bones. He sits by the bay, near Ellis Island, and dreams about floating down the narrows. Not a drink in sight. He doesn’t know how Lennie finds him. Maybe he guessed? Maybe somebody recognised Jack just sitting there and it went round the city like wildfire. 

Maybe they’d talked about it once, because Claire liked it here, and it seemed the kind of thing you’d talk about with a guy like Lennie Briscoe. 

They sit next to each other on the bench. The wind from the bay whips at their faces, but they’re hardened to it in the summer breeze. 

‘Three years,’ Briscoe says - he whistles deep. His words are taken on the wind, so fast that Jack could ignore them if he wanted. 

‘Three years is a long time.’ 

‘So that’s why you’re sitting here and not in your nice cushy office, right?’ 

‘Right.’ 

The contradiction sits like a third person beside them. They don’t know each other. Yeah maybe they’ve worked together for five years, maybe they both cried at the hospital the night Claire Kincaid died. But they don’t know each other. They just share this guilt, this deep seated pain that swells as wide as the long island sound some days. 

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Jack says. Lennie turns to face him. 

‘Look, McCoy. I’ve been around the block a thousand times. And this -  _ this - _ whatever you’re doing. It’s not going to help.’ 

‘I don’t need a therapist.’ 

‘And I’m no doctor.’ 

‘So what do you propose I do? Bury my head in a bottle? Isn’t that what got us here?’

A low blow. Jack knows Briscoe hasn’t had a drink since that night. He knows it yet he lashed out with the gut punch, like a lawyer on the stand with one eye on the jury. He keeps expecting a defence guy to leap up and say,  _ objection irrelevant, objection prejudicial, objection, objection.  _

But Lennie just sits there and takes it. He takes it and Jack’s floundering. He’s begging for a fight, for anything. He wouldn’t mind a slap in the face if it meant he’d feel something other than the black hole in his chest. Three years. It doesn’t matter what he said. It feels like five minutes. 

He thinks about saying,  _ I saw a ghost,  _ about saying,  _ do you think about it all the time?  _ He thinks about just getting up and pummelling his own chest and screaming  _ why did we let her get the force of this? Why not me, why not you? _

‘Let’s just sit here, Jack,’ the stranger, Lennie Briscoe says, ‘cept he isn’t no stranger, not really. Because that last day, Claire’s last day, it marks them like indelible ink, like a tattoo right on their chests, one they share. 

‘Let’s just sit here, Jack,’ he says again. 

They watch the bay. The tide comes in and out. He took a whole day off for this. But he thinks, watching the waves lap at the concrete, Claire loved looking at the water here. She thought it could calm anything, anything in the whole damn world. 

He turns to Lennie Briscoe and offers a hand to shake. The detective takes it. ‘I get it. You know, I get why she loved this place.’ 

‘Yeah,’ says Lennie Briscoe. ‘Yeah I do too.’ 

….

Abbie left him with her arm through his, outside the courthouse. She isn’t going far, just down the block. He’ll see her round. 

But the office is quiet. Adam was shipped out a year back, along with all his secrets and all his memories, all the one liners the world could ever offer. Nora Lewin’s here now, she’s in her office right this moment, glasses held tight against her face, reading the cannon of ethics like it’s going out of style. 

Her door is closed. He can see the light bleed under the frame and into the carpet. Jack climbs up onto the couch and reaches blindly for a book of his own. There’s nothing else to do. The paperwork’s all on Abbie, like she took it as punishment for running away, for leaving him. 

He pulls a book towards him and it tumbles off the shelf. It hits him squarely in the chest. His breath escapes like a little ‘oof’ and he swears he hears someone laughing. He turns around. And Jack, oh Jack McCoy, he said last time that he didn’t believe in ghosts. But this time -

\- Claire. Claire is right there, by the window, in  _ his chair,  _ with her feet on  _ his desk _ . She’s wearing exactly the same as she was last time. Down to the drop of red at her temple. Wait, no that wasn’t there. That wasn’t there. But it’s here, now, it slips down her cheek like a half forgotten tear. 

‘Another one hit’s the road,’ she says, spinning round. 

‘I’m not doing this,’ he says, softly exhaling, heaving the book towards the table. Nora’s in the other room. He keeps his voice down. He doesn’t believe in ghosts. He doesn't talk to them. 

‘Abbie was clever, wasn’t she? She gave you a run for your money.’ 

Jack shakes his head. Her voice is pitch perfect, crystal clear. 

‘I’m not -’ he starts again, but Claire is smiling and it’s distracting and he bites back his words for fear they’d be swallowed by tears. He’s frustrated, because it’s been years, it’s been years and he’s over  _ this.  _

‘Abbie got three,’ Claire says, and her eyes narrow, not that he’s looking. No, cause she’s a ghost and - 

‘Three what?’ he says, like an instinct. Like they’re discussing a case from the last decade. Like nothings changed. 

‘Three years, Jack,’ she says. ‘More than me.’ 

_And why was that?_ He wants to say, _because you died on me Claire. Two years, then out_ , he wants to say it but he doesn’t. 

‘You fight with her more than you fought with me. She’s got some real convictions, that kid. Not one for a bleeding heart.’ 

He nearly laughs. ‘She believes in some things I don’t.’ 

Claire grins, her eyes are wide. She lifts a hand and starts counting. ‘One: anti abortion. Two: anti gun control. Three: she doesn’t even believe in criminal rehabilitation.’ He finds her performance enrapturing, the way she keeps on looking right at him as she speaks. She’s a ghost, he says, he reminds. But she’s charismatic even in death. ‘Oh, and Jack,’ she says, leaning forward towards him, ‘here’s the stinger. Wait for it. Abbie’s pro-death penalty.’ 

Claire laughs at the irony. Jack doesn’t. He feels it weigh down his shoulders, like he’s dragged towards the ground under the force of it. 

He bows his head. 

‘She’s a damn good lawyer, though,’ she says, like she can’t believe it. ‘I can just about see how you like her.’ 

‘Nothing like you.’ 

‘No,’ Claire says. She finally looks away. Freed from her gaze, he lifts the book and rests it on the table. ‘I think, Jack, I think that’s a good thing now.’ 

Jack is lulled by the sound of her voice. She’s just a ghost - a memory. But she’s Claire and - 

The door handle clicks, footsteps echo. Jack snaps his head round. The door to Nora Lewin’s office swings open. 

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘I thought you had company?’ 

‘No,’ he says, holding up the book. Over his shoulder, Claire is gone from his chair, he doesn't need to look round to know that. ‘Just cursing how heavy these law books are now I’m getting older.’ 

Nora doesn’t look impressed. She doesn't even look convinced. She purses her lips. 

‘Night, Jack,’ she says, kindly. Almost too kindly. 

He listens to her walk away and imagines that it’s Claire’s footsteps he can hear. 

….

Over a plate of fries and a can of soda, Liz Olivet leans forward to pick up the salt shaker. 

‘Like I said, I don’t know why you called me here, Jack.’ 

He shrugs. ‘It’s about one of my cases.’ 

‘Yes, but we’ve been here half an hour and you haven’t even mentioned one.’ 

He pushes himself forward and takes one of Olivet’s fries. 

‘Yeah, but I was getting there.’ 

‘Oh yes, because Jack McCoy’s one to beat around the bush.’ 

She gently slaps his hand away from her food. 

He knows she knows. It’s not about a case. It’s just - it’s just he dreamt about Claire every night this week and he’s scared of sleeping. He’s scared of that face when he closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to be scared of her. 

Olivet humors him. ‘Is it about the rowan case, because Ms Southerlyn already contacted my office about the matter. It’s textbook insanity. You’re not going to persuade me to say anything else.’ 

Jack nods, he eats another of her fries. She gives up trying to stop him. 

‘Hmm,’ he says, like he’s mulling it over. He’d forgotten about the rowan case. He had asked Serena to give Liz a call. He’s mildly surprised she did, cause Serena’s not the kind of woman who always does what he asks.

He folds his arms and leans back in his chair. He looks at his watch. Twenty minutes, then his lunch break’s up. They’ve just been sitting here catching up, talking about her new cat and his dead house plants for half an hour. Olivet’s patient, but there’s a limit. 

She reaches for a straw. The killer blow. 

‘What’s this really about?’ she says. She’s not looking directly at him. He guesses that’s on purpose. ‘Because we know each other well and-’

‘Nightmares.’ He spits the word like it’s poison. He’s quick on the draw. 

She pokes the straw into the soda can, like a puncture. ‘Is it medication you’re after? Or counsel?’ 

He shrugs. He really doesn’t know why he called her. He’s had  _ weaknesses _ before, but none that have brought him straight to Liz’s door. After Claire died, Adam made him have one session with her before he was allowed back to work. He bullshitted his way right through it and Liz Olivet knew for every second. But a man who doesn’t want to talk is a man who can’t be helped. She let it go for another time. 

This is  _ another time _ . 

‘I just want to know how to make it stop.’ 

‘What are the nightmares about?’ she takes out a flip book and turns to a clean page. He hates the idea of her taking notes but he doesn’t stop her. He just watches her write  _ Jack  _ and underlines it. 

‘I dream I’m in the car.’ 

Olivet looks up. She doesn’t ask which car. She already knows. There’s only one car in Jack McCoy’s life that he could have nightmares about. The car. Claire’s car. 

‘How long have you been having these nightmares?’ 

He huffs. But this is what he wanted. Whether he realised it or not. He called. He made this happen. 

‘I had them a lot,  _ after _ . They’d gone away.’ 

‘And now?’ 

‘It’s been a week.’ 

Olivet raises an eyebrow. A week and you’re already seeking me out. Christ Jack, a week - it must be bad. 

‘And what happens in the dream?’ 

‘I can’t save her. I try but -’ he shakes his head. Liz scribbles something down. 

‘Is it just the nightmares?’ 

He sighs. He thinks of the ghost, the girl who sat at his desk and smiled the way Claire did. He thinks of how vivid and real and painful it was to see Claire Kincaid like she was breathing. But he knows it was a memory, nothing more. No doubt. Claire is dead. She wouldn’t bother to come back and haunt him. 

‘Yes,’ he says. He waits a little too long, thinking of the ghost. Liz can sense the hesitation but she doesn’t push it. ‘It’s not like I’m constantly tortured by  _ what happened _ . I’m over it.’ 

Liz writes something down, so fast that Jack can’t read what it is. He has his arms folded, resting on the table. He looks at his watch again. He’s got a feeling he’ll be late back to the office. 

What he said is true. Or he thought it was. He is over Claire. There have been new assistants and new girls in his bed. There has been laughter, smiles, there have been days when he felt on top of the world. He is over it. He left it behind, he left her behind. That brings its own sense of guilt. 

‘Why now?’ Olivet asks. ‘What triggered the nightmares? Do you have any idea?’ she is looking at her notepad and not at him. He faces the question alone. 

At first he shrugs. He thinks back to last week, the Monday, the first night he didn’t sleep. It’s not like he had a case that reminded him of Claire, it’s not like one of the bastards they put away came back for a second go. 

‘Is it because of detective Briscoe?’ Liz offers, softly. Jack gapes. It’s been two months since Lennie was buried. Two months and Jack went, he did and he’s not a funerals kind of guy. They buried Lennie Brisoce and it felt like the end of something, end of something more than just the man himself. Maybe it snapped something in Jack, that last link, that last face Claire ever saw. 

‘I mean, we used to see each other every week at work. But I don’t see what this has to do with night-’

‘What about outside of work?’ Liz Olivet says. She glances up. Jack shuffles on the bench, blindsided. 

‘Sometimes.’ 

‘Why?’ 

Jack doesn’t answer the question. He thinks Liz Olivet already knows the answer. They’d meet up maybe five times a year. Down by the bay or somewhere else, somewhere warmer when it was winter. They’d drink black coffee and they were the only days that Jack let himself say the name out loud anymore. He and Lennie, they would tell stories, old stories, about her and Jack said that was ok because he wasn’t crying. 

‘Were you angry at Detective Briscoe?’ Olivet asks, almost off hand. 

Jack laughs. ‘No. Why would I be angry at him?’ 

Liz looks up. He sees the question in her eyes before she asks it. He turns away, hides his own eyes. ‘Because he couldn’t save Claire either.’ 

In the nightmares, he’s always where Lennie would’ve been. He’s always in the passenger seat, like he was that morning when they drove back from Attica. He knows what will happen, and he wishes he didn’t, because he dreams so real that he wants to talk about something else. She smiles at him and he reaches for her arm and in his head he can touch her. 

But he sees the lights and they’re so blinding. The other car. It screeches out of the dark and she doesn’t even scream. Someone told him that. It must’ve been Lennie, maybe it was at the hospital. She didn’t even have time to scream, to be scared. 

He wishes he could’ve saved her. But it wasn’t in the car that Jack McCoy made his mistake. 

Liz looks at her own watch. She flips the notebook closed. She’s looking at him so kind that it hurts just to stay like that. He’s not vulnerable, people don’t look at him that way. He’s not hurting. He doesn’t give a damn. 

‘Call me, Jack,’ she says, putting her notebook in her bag. ‘We’ll sort something, alright?’ 

And he looks at his watch and he knows he’s late. 

….

He’s waiting for it this time. Every moment from the second Serena gets up and storms out the door. With every heartbeat he’s waiting for it. 

He thought it would be at the office. But it’s not. It’s one morning when he wakes, three days after Serena Southerlyn gets fired. 

She’s sitting on the other side of the bed. No leather jacket this time. He gets up and watches her. He swallows because he forgot how real a ghost Claire Kincaid could seem. 

‘You’re getting old, Jack,’ she says. ‘An empty bed?’ 

He faces away and pulls his socks on. There’s half an hour before he needs to be at a court sentencing hearing. And  _ I saw a ghost  _ isn’t going to cut it as a reasonable excuse for not being on time. 

He hadn’t thought about seeing her here. The nightmares stopped long ago. Liz Olivet helped him with that, no matter how reluctant he was to talk about anything. Sleeping tablets strong enough to knock out a horse. Just a month and that did the trick.

But he was still waiting for the ghost. 

‘You finally found a bleeding heart, then?’ she says. ‘Serena Southerlyn, too involved for her own good.’

He takes a deep, shaky, breath. There’s no one else here. But she’s not real - she’s not and yet - yet, he’ll talk to her anyway because he’s  _ lonely.  _ Oh he’s so lonely. 

‘She’ll make a good advocate,’ he says. ‘Women’s rights. She’s up there with you on that.’ 

‘A not so latent feminist?’ 

He nods. He strips his vest off and picks a crumpled shirt from the hanger. He slips it on and turns back to Claire. 

‘You didn’t get her into bed, though. Not so like me.’ 

He laughs. An actually down to his toes kind of laugh.

‘She’s gay. I don’t exactly fit for Serena.’ 

‘You were four for four with me. Jamie and Abbie, they weren’t-’ 

He cuts in, interrupting a ghost. ‘They weren’t you.’ 

And he’s right. Because Ellen and Sally and Diana, they were part of a pattern, but Claire - she stopped it in its tracks. Stone cold dead with the woman herself. No more assistants warming his bed, no more justifying it with, well we share the same hours it’s  _ inevitable.  _ Because if any of the women who came after Claire Kincaid proved anything, it’s that it wasn’t, it’s not just the  _ way he is _ as Adam Schiff once said. It’s not. It’s the way he wanted it. 

But the ghost on the other side of the bed, she was different. She’s never left this place. Why didn’t he think about that? Why was he so sure he’d see her at the office. Why was he so unprepared for her face in these walls, in this apartment that’s changed so little since she died?

Her clothes were in his closet. He bundled them up and pushed them to the back on the day of the funeral. He pushed them until they felt like dark matter, until he couldn’t see them anymore. He threw out her toothbrush, her make up. He kept a lipstick under the sink and a girl he brought home a couple years later found it and took it and he never forgave her that. 

The bathroom smelled like her perfume for sixty days. Sixty days and it felt like dreaming. 

‘They weren’t you,’ he says, again. He has his hands over his eyes. He remembers the way Claire would come up behind him as he sat at the edge of the bed. The way she would lazily drape her arms around his shoulders in the morning before court. She would kiss his neck and he felt alive then. He felt alive in a way only she could make him. 

He looks up at the ghost. It’s been nine years. She looks like she hasn’t aged a day. 

He picks a tie off the bedside table and slips it into his collar. His hands fold and tie, as if in automation. A long time ago, in this room, Claire reached out and she said, ‘here, let me,’ and she knotted his tie with quick, cold hands. She was laughing.

‘I’m going to be late,’ he says. 

‘Ok.’

He puts his head between his knees because he’s scared he’ll be sick. It’s like he’s hungover, but not from alcohol. From her. 

She smiles softly at him from across the room. 

She was sitting there when she said it. They were facing each other and it was dark. It was dark and he could only see the outline of her face. She leant across and kissed him sharply, and as she pulled away she said - she said  _ it _ . 

‘I love you,’ and then she waited, the way he waited for her ghost all those years later. Her hands were on his shoulder blades. It was dark and it was late and when he said, ‘I love you,’ he didn’t realise quite how much he meant it. 

And then he kissed her like he was dying, but it wasn’t him who should’ve been worried, it was her. 

Jack grabs his shoes from under the edge of the bed and pulls them on. When he glances round, one shoelace tied, he realises he’s alone in the room. 

‘Enough,’ he says, and this time there’s really no one there. ‘Enough,’ he says. 

He gets to the court with two minutes to spare. 

….

He hadn’t thought there’d be anyone else here. Winter, ice in his bones, hands stuffed deep into his pockets. 

‘Up and out, isn’t that what they say?’ Anita Van Buren calls from the other side of the grave. ‘Over thirty years and here I am, getting free.’ 

Jack nods. 

‘It’s a lot of service, Anita. A lot owed.’

‘And you, Jack? You ever think how much time you’ve served?’ 

He shrugs. In all honesty, he’s tried to think of anything else. Van Buren reaches forward to brush the snow off the top of the grave stone. 

‘I thought I’d say goodbye, you know. Before I left. I was looking in on Lennie and…’ she smiles, kindly. 

Van Buren is moving to Michigan, packing up and leaving the city. And here she is, at this graveyard blanketed by the snow, leaving farewells with her footsteps pressed into an icy wake. 

‘It was her birthday a couple days ago,’ Jack says, as if he’s searching for a reason to be here at all. 

‘I know.’ 

They’ve outlasted everyone else in this damn city. Adam and Lennie and Claire - Mike and Rey, they fall like dominoes. Even Ed struck out first. It’s like they’ve been stood waiting for the pins to fall, piece by piece, waiting for the replacement, the out of place face to come swinging into view. But they’ve seen it all. He’s been here fifteen years and for every single one, Anita Van Buren has been fighting the same fight. 

And now - 

Now it’s just going to be him. She can sense it, the lack of surety. The idea that maybe it would be the two of them till the end of time, the bosses, immortal, looking down on all those fresh faces that never stuck it out long enough. 

‘How is it being the one to quit?’ he asks. His hands are shaking and he regrets not bringing gloves. He pulls his hat further down his face, so it covers his ears. 

‘New.’ 

‘Good or - ?’

‘Different.’ she laughs. ‘Maybe you should try it Jack.’ 

His relationship with the woman on the other side of the grave is practically non-existent. It’s built from work and work alone. It’s late night’s standing by a one way mirror, leaning close against the glass and hoping the tape will pick up the confession. It’s catching a killer and a Chinese on the same night and never having time for both. 

It’s funerals. It’s funerals where he or maybe she carries the coffin. It’s crying, but not quite crying because the two of them are strong people, and  _ strong  _ people don’t cry at funerals, even when it’s Lennie or it’s Claire. Even when - 

It’s a relationship that should’ve left them strangers, or should’ve left them clinging to each other because  _ they’re the only ones left _ . It has left them this, instead, standing either side of a grave filled with a strange kind of intimacy he’ll never find with anyone else as long as he lives. 

‘Do you come often?’ he asks. He gestures around at the headstones, dampened by the snow, the crosses that poke out from the blanket of white that has laid itself down. 

‘I try and make it down once a year.’

He nods sharply. He does the same, these days. Once a year. Her birthday, and sometimes he leaves flowers and sometimes he doesn’t because he knows the winter will kill them before they get the chance to live. 

He knows he won’t ever see Anita Van Buren again. Once she’s in Michigan, the tenuous links that draw them together will snap. Snap sure, like bone; fierce and certain, irreparable. They were forged in this city, under the darkness of night, from huddling ‘round a desk at two am, arguing their cases, with their teams, and Jack McCoy thinks - I’ve never really looked her in the face. All these years, and I never did. 

‘Do you see much of the old guard?’ she asks, tentatively. The _ old guard  _ could encompass a whole boatload of faces, half forgotten and put away. Lawyers and cops, judges who you could always wake 3 am with a warrant with more holes in than swiss cheese.  _ The old guard _ is Jack and Anita, these days. 

He shakes his head. ‘You?’ he asks. 

‘Some of the boys,’ she says. ‘Mike, Rey, Ed. They come by and make sure I’m ok.’ 

She hesitates. He knows what she wants to ask. He knows just how she’d say it: Jack, hey, Jack look at me, does anybody swing by and make sure  _ you’re _ ok? And her voice would have an edge, a sharp, thirty years in the making, kind of voice. But she doesn’t, cause that would be damn close to crossing a line that the two of them have never crossed, never will. A bridge too far, a bridge to questions like, are you ok? Or I miss how it was. Or maybe, if the day’s dark and the curtains are closed, something like, how did it come to this, how did it come to  _ just us?  _

Van Buren gestures at the grave. ‘You know what Mike and Rey did, right. Before the funeral?’ 

Jack pushes his hands deeper into his pockets. The clouds have started to roll, deep and dark and heavy. It’s going to snow again, he can feel it in the air. He kicks his feet against the frozen ground. 

‘No.’ 

‘Well, Mike, you know him - that temper. He heard from Lennie that her parents wanted some law school friends to carry the coffin. I can hear him now, god, he stormed right into my office - even though he should’ve been in Staten Island on a stake out, and he said, L-T, you heard this bullshit? Those people didn’t know her, she hadn’t seen any of them in a decade. They didn’t even  _ talk  _ to McCoy.’ 

Van Buren looks up at him. Jack hasn’t heard the story before. The days around Claire’s funeral are patchy, dark and fuzzy round the edges. He knows her mom and step dad didn’t want him there. On account of the age difference, on account of the way he cried drunk at the hospital. The way he kept saying,  _ I‘m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s my fault _ , like it was a prayer not a confession. 

Van Buren keeps talking. ‘He roped Curtis into coming with him. And they barrelled right over to find her folks. And I told Lennie they’d get into deep shit if they did that, so we followed in a squad car. But when we got there they weren’t throwing punches. Nothing like that. Mike was crying and Rey was talking to her parents. I think that’s what made them realise - realise that she had real friends, you know. Not just colleagues.’

Jack carried the coffin at the funeral. He carried it with Mike Logan and Rey Curtis and Claire’s step dad. Just the four of them. They asked Jack the day before, or Mac did because her mother was out of it. He’d always wondered why they’d changed their mind. He’d put it down to Adam, long ago. 

He knows that the DA’s office - or the police precinct - weren’t the whole of Claire’s world. He knows  _ he  _ wasn’t it. There were a hundred people at the wake. Lawyers and cops and people Jack didn’t even recognise. Margot bell came up and she shook his hand and said, ‘Fucking shame ‘eh?’ and he was up against her in court in a fortnight.

‘When are you leaving?’ he asks. 

‘The day after tomorrow.’ 

‘You deserve it, Anita.’ 

They nod. An appreciation of the years that have slipped between them, of all the cases, all the ones won and all the ones lost. All those years, he thinks. All those fucking years and it comes to this. 

He goes to walk away. But Van Buren reaches out, reaches over Claire Kincaid’s grave, and takes his arm. It feels heavy on him, like a commitment. They share too many histories, he thinks. They’ll leave it like this because there’s no other way to leave it. 

‘She’d want you to be happy,’ Anita Van Buren says. 

‘You can’t say that.’ he laughs and shakes his head. 

‘Ok, then,’ she says, hand still resting on his arm like a promise. ‘I want you to be happy.’ 

And he doesn’t cry in front of Anita Van Buren, but Jack McCoy, he comes damn close. 

….

The ghost stays away. He’s almost upset about it. But he guesses, he’s stopped having ADA’s quit on him. 

Twenty three years. Twenty three years after Claire Kincaid dies, Jack hangs up his hat. He puts his hands up and says, this is it. The end of the road. This is Jack McCoy’s final stand. 

He sits in the office with the books in boxes, haphazard, unordered. His photographs of his daughter and grandkid have been wrapped up and put away, the handwritten legal notes from Adam that he kept in his top drawer have been set aside. His whole life here is packed up and ready to go. 

Maybe he should’ve guessed. Maybe he should’ve known today, of all days. Sunday, late. Nobody else at the office. 

He closes his eyes and takes a breath, deep down to his toes. He exhales and looks up. 

She’s sitting on the couch. He finds himself smiling. 

‘Finally,’ she says. 

_ Finally.  _

He gets up and goes and sits next to her. She tucks an errant strand of hair behind her ear, the way he did once, a lifetime ago. 

She reaches towards him. 

‘Your hair,’ she says. She sounds surprised. 

‘I know, I know.’ 

Gone grey. Happened way back. She hasn’t changed. Oh, how unfair it seems. He’s got old without her. 

Once, when they were together, they were lying in her bed at her tiny one bed apartment near the bay, and she turned to him and said, ‘Jack, let’s go drive to Florida,’ and it was a dream. She said, ‘When we’re old, let’s go to Florida and swim in the ocean there.’ 

She rolled over and laid on her back and he kissed her neck and said, ‘Yes. Yes. Of course,’ and he would’ve promised her the world if she’d asked. 

In his office, the ghost looks around the room. Jack lays his arm on the back of the couch. 

‘So you got Adam’s office. I thought politics didn’t mix well with the great Jack McCoy?’

‘Other people thought they knew better.’ 

She laughs. It sounds like a memory, the way she laughed long ago when they were sitting on this couch and Adam went to find a stapler and said, before he left, ‘I’ll be five minutes,  _ behave  _ yourselves.’ 

And Jack had put his hands across her rib cage. He said, ‘He’ll never know,’ and kissed her cheek. 

She laughed, laughed so hard, and kissed him sharp on his lips. Then she poked her finger at his chest and said, ‘Adam already knows. Adam knows everything. Adam knows  _ you. _ ’ 

Jack blinks into the gloom of the office. The ghost is looking right back at him. He puts his hands behind his head and rests. 

‘Where will you go?’ she asks. 

‘Here and there.’ 

‘You’ve always got a plan.’ 

‘I’m not going to leave the city.’ 

He wonders why he said that. There’s nobody here anymore. Rebecca lives in San Diego, on the other side of the country. Logically he should sell his apartment, move over there, get free of the shackles of this place and the law, get out like Anita Van Buren did before him. 

But he won’t. Jack McCoy has been in this city since university. It’s been with him for over fifty years. Claire is here. Six feet down, under the weight of all that earth. 

‘You can go, Jack,’ she says from the other end of the couch. Her eyes are soft, kind, easy. He misses the way she looked at him. He misses the way she made him smile, like nothing in the world was easier. 

‘I’m not going.’ 

‘Your choice.’ 

‘You made it for me,’ he says, sighing, resting his hands on his thighs, ‘a long time ago.’ 

Often, he wonders what would’ve happened if Claire Kincaid’s ghost hadn’t showed up one evening and started haunting him. He would’ve moved on, he says, he would’ve fallen in love time and time again. He would’ve been a good father and a good son, he would’ve seen the world, the world would’ve seen him. 

And if -- if she hadn’t died. What then? Maybe he would have swum in the ocean in Florida. Maybe she would’ve left him, left the law. 

That’s what kills him, watching her ghost cross her arms. He doesn’t know. She could’ve left him the second she picked him up from that bar, that night if he’d stayed. She could’ve been driving the car and he could’ve been in the passenger seat and she’d say, ‘Jack, it’s over,’ and she wouldn’t look at him. And he’d cry, and Jack McCoy  _ never  _ cried. 

Or she could’ve said, ‘I’m quitting,’ and he would’ve said, ‘Ok. I still love you. Law or no law.’ and they would go back to his place. He would hold her until they fell asleep and he would never be happier than in that moment, with her in his arms, so safe. 

But it’s been twenty three years and he  _ just doesn’t know.  _

‘Don’t ask me,’ the ghost says. ‘Don’t ask me if I would’ve stayed.’ And he laughs. She can read minds now. Claire couldn’t, before. 

‘Why not?’ 

‘Jack, please,’ she says, and there are tears in her eyes. Her voice pushes and pulls with pain. 

She leans forward, towards him, and he wants to rest his old, weary body, with hers. 

‘Why not?’ he says, again. There’s a lump in his throat. She looks up at him and she’s crying. ‘Claire,’ he says, desperately. ‘Claire, Claire -’

‘I’m not Claire.’ 

‘No - no.’ 

‘I’m nobody, Jack.’ She smiles at him. ‘You’re free Jack,’ she says. ‘You’re out the other side. The law can leave you alone.’ She reaches out and her hand, it’s so close to his cheek that just a fraction more and it could rest there, where it belonged once. ‘It’s ok, Jack. It’s ok. You’re ok.’ 

He wants to hold her hand and kiss it. He wants to hold her, just one more time. He wants to say all the things he never said, because there’d be time for them, later, and there never was. 

Twenty three years. And there Claire Kincaid is, just a ghost. 

The last thing he ever said to her was, ‘Come pick me up. Please. God, I’m drunk. Come get me Claire. I’m sorry.’ 

But he snapped out of it. He walked back to the bar and Lennie Briscoe was there. And Jack laughed, sat right back down, got another drink. He left before she got there, because something in that bar wound him tight. 

The last thing she ever said to him was, ‘Calm down, Jack. Calm down. Tell me where you are.’ 

And she went back to talk to Anita Van Buren before she swung round to the bar. That was enough time for Jack to forget what he said, to forget what she said back. For him to walk out and not have a second thought. 

He doesn’t believe in ghosts. Nope. Not at all. He is Jack McCoy, rational down to cynical. He’s seen all the world can offer, right under the floorboards of humanity and back out. He doesn't believe in ghost but - 

but -

he believed in Claire Kincaid, long ago. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> 5USA has taken over my life with Law and Order repeats.


End file.
